The Guardian Worships Tony Judt

We wrote about an awful essay by Rosenfeld that attacked progressive Jews for their antiZionism. Now Gaby Wood as the Observer in the Guardian shows what happens when the backlash begins. In "The new Jewish question" he focused on Judt because he is British-born. Remember this is an article about Judt, one of the notorious progressives. When the progressives themselves answer the lightweight attacks by Rosenfeld and others - that is when the proverbial caca will hit the fan.

I'll cite just a few short excerpts.

A furious row has been raging in the international Jewish community over the rights and wrongs of criticising Israel. At its centre is a British historian who accuses his fellow Jews in the US of stifling any debate about Israel. His opponents say his views give succour to anti-Semites. One thing's for sure: any appearance of consensus over the Middle East has been shattered. ...

Judt was born in London in 1948. Growing up Jewish in 1950s Britain, as he has said, he came to know a thing or two about anti-Semitism. His mother was from London and his father, who was born in Belgium, had come there as a stateless person. Judt was brought up in what he describes as 'a fairly standard left-wing Jewish secular political environment', but with close links to his Yiddish-speaking grandparents, all of whom were eastern European Jews, from Romania and Russia and Lithuania and Poland. As a teenager, he joined a left-wing Zionist organisation and became very active in the kibbutz movement, living in Israel on and off for a large part of the early 1960s.

'What changed for me,' he says now, 'was that in 1967 I went out as a volunteer at the time of the Six Day War; after the war was finished I volunteered for auxiliary military service and I ended up as a sort of informal translator for other volunteers up on the Golan Heights. And there for the first time I began to see another face of Israel that had been camouflaged from me by my enthusiasm for the idealism of the kibbutz movement.' He became, he recalls, quickly very detached from Israel. 'And in fact when I was a student in Paris I became involved in 1970 with Palestinians and young Israelis, trying to organise groups to talk about peace settlements and ending the conflict.'